"Josef recalled a very old idea of his, which at
the time he had considered to be blasphemous: that adherence to
Communism has nothing to do with Marx and his theories; it was simply
that the period gave people a way to fulfill the most diverse
psychological needs: the need to look non-conformist; or the need to
obey; or the need to punish the wicked; or the need to be useful; or the
need to march forward into the future with youth; or the need to have a
big family around you."

Milan Kundera

Ignorance

"Communism never existed, nor was it intended to exist. It was just another
siren's song used to lure societies to their illuminazi doom."

-Paul Drockton

"Despite his atheism, Marx cannot be understood without the Bible. His myth
of a perfect society, surmounting history, beyond history, is in fact the
Biblical myth of Paradise on Earth....What is Marxism if not Messianism?"

-Eugene Ionesco

"Marxism is a product of the bourgeois mind."

Schumpeter

"...businesses plan their activities-often down to the last detail. Indeed,
that is where Marx got the idea of centrally planning the whole economy. When he
talked about planning, there was in fact no real-life government that was
practicing planning. At the time, only firms planned. What Marx predicted was
taht the "rational' planning approach of the capitalism firms would eventually
prove superior to the wasteful anarchy of the market and thus eventually be
extended to the whole economy. To be sure, he criticized planning within
the firm as despotism by capitalism, but he belied that, once private property
was abolished and the capitalists eliminated, the rational elements of such
despotism could be isolated and harness for the social good.

With the development of capitalism, more and more areas of the
economy have become dominated by large corporations. This means that the area of
the capitalism economy that is covered by planning has in fact grown. To give
you a concrete example these days, depending on the estimate, between one third
and one half of international trade consists of transfers among different units
with transnational corporations."

Ha-Joon Chang

Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

"We Communists believe that capitalism is a hell in which laboring people are
condemned to slavery."

-Nikita Khrushchev New York Times 1970

"Rationality is the last thing to ask of all those-and I was one of them-who
took part in that chimerical enterprise. At the end of the day we built nothing
that lasted: no political system, no economic system, no communities, no ethic,
no aesthetic. We wanted to realize the highest human aspirations and we ended up
birthing monsters."

-Paul Noirot

"Far from being the science of working-class misfortune, Marxism is an
intellectualist philosophy, which has seduced certain groups of the proletariat;
far from being the immanent philosophy of the Proletariat, Communism merely
makes use of this pseudo-science in order to attain its own end, the seizure of
power."

-Raymond Aron

"Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system
of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by
which to judge events and actions; and secondly, a guide to those ends which
implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which
mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. "

-Joseph Schumpeter

"Karl Marx is one of the most influential figures in human
history. Judged by the number of those who have regarded themselves his
followers, and of the organizations set up by them, he has inspired the
greatest mass movement of all times. This movement transcends national,
racial, and continental boundaries. Only in Anglo-Saxon communities has
he had a comparatively small following, to some extent because of the
use made of his ideas elsewhere. The result is that England and
particularly the United States , he is often condemned without even
being read. On the other hand, in some regions of the rest of the world,
a new religion has arisen which proclaims that History is God and Karl
Marx its chief prophet"

Sidney Hook

Marx and the Marxists

"There is a deep and bitter irony in the fact that another deep reader of
man's economic nature-and arguably the most astute interpreter of capitalism
despite the tragic misreading that his work has engendered-sits at the opposite
end of the ideological spectrum from Adam Smith. But a careful reading of Adam
Smith and Karl Marx shows that these two thinkers share much more than is
commonly believed. As we pick up the pieces of a world economy that was almost
destroyed by the credit crisis of 2008, Marx's stinging comment about history
repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce mocks capitalism's
compulsion to repeat the mistakes of the past. Marx's economic theories are
highly complex and go far beyond the concept of class struggle for which he is
best known. Indeed, it would be difficult to discuss the death of capital
without addressing one of capital's most important critics. Despite the
proclivity on the part of U.S. economic commentators to dismiss Marx as a
crackpot, his writings offer profound insights into capitalism and capitalist
processes. In fact, his work has been regaining its reputation in the wake of
the financial crisis."

-Michael Lewitt

The Death of Capital

"The perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous....Thus it
comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in
the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labor
constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that
the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his
subjugation."

-Friedrich Engels

"It may be appropriate to remind those who may be inclined to
treat Marx as a mere revolutionary or hot partisan that he was more than
that. He was a doctor of philosophy from a German university, possessing
the hallmark of the scholar. He was a student of Greek and Latin
learning. He read, besides German, his native tongue, Greek, Latin,
French, English, Italian, and Russian. He was widely read in
contemporary history and economic thought. Hence, however much one may
dislike Marx's personal views, one cannot deny to him wide and deep
knowledge-and a fearless and sacrificial life. He not only interpreted
history, as everyone does who writes any history, but he helped to make
history. Possibly he may have known something."

Charles A. Beard

American Historical Review, Oct 1935

"It is one of the peculiar ironies of history that
there are no limits to the misunderstanding and distortion of theories,
even in an age when there is unlimited access to the sources; there is
no more drastic example of this phenomenon that what has happened to the
theory of Karl Marx in the last few decades. There is continuous
reference to Marx and to Marxism in the press, in the speeches of
politicians, in books and articles written by respectable social
scientists and philosophers; yet with few exceptions, it seems that the politicians
and newspapermen have never as much as glanced at a line written by
Marx, and that the social scientists are satisfied with a minimal
knowledge of Marx. Apparently they feel safe in acting as experts in
this field, since nobody with power and status in the social-research
empire challenges their ignorant statements."

Erich Fromm

Marx's Concept of Man

"The reductio ad absurdium of Marxism is the case of Marx himself. if
the Marxist diagnosis of the economic motivation of human behavior is correct,
then Marx's own career must be the exception that proves the rule. The
middle-class son of an affluent Jewish lawyer who converted to Protestantism.
Marx had aspirations toward the aristocracy, as evidenced by his marriage to
jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a government official who was a member of
the petty nobility. What class motivation could possibly have influenced Marx to
take up the cause of the proletariat? As a member of a minority, however, his
social climbing, his self-serving dogmatism, and his hatred of
nineteenth-century European civilization become more understandable. What is
more, like all professional dogmatists. Marx was loathe to practice what he
preached. At the very time he was finishing his masterwork, Das Kapital,
he invested heavily and foolishly in the London stock market and had to call on
his banker uncle Philips, whose descendants founded the giant Dutch electronics
firm of the same name, to bail him out. " See the
German periodical, Capital. Hamburg June 1970 p166

Wilmot Robertson

The Dispossessed majority

"Theoretical Marxism, as realized in Russian Bolshevism, has acquired the
energy and the self-contained exclusive character of a Weltanschauung, but at
the same time an uncanny likeness to what it is fighting against....Though
originally....built....upon science and technology, it has created a prohibition
of thought which is just as ruthless as was that of religion in the past. any
critical examination of Marxist theory is forbidden, doubts of its correctness
are punished in the same way as heresy was once punished in the Catholic Church.
The writings of Marx have taken the place of the Bible....though they would seem
to be no more free from contradictions....than those older sacred books."

-Sigmund Freud

"Even if one, as I do, deeply regrets the fact that a distorted and degraded
"Marxism" is preached in almost one-third of the world, this fact does not
diminish the unique historical significance of Marx. But quite aside from this
historical fact, I consider Marx, the thinker, as being of much grater depth and
scope than Freud. Marx was capable of connecting a spiritual heritage of the
enlightenment humanism and German idealism with the reality of economic and
social facts, and thus to lay the foundations for a new science of man and
society which is empirical and at the same time filled with the spirit of the
Western humanist tradition...."

-Erich Fromm

"Although humanist Marxism is fundamentally
discredited by its Stalinist and post-Stalinist practice, and has
recently attracted more obloquy by the destruction of 'socialism with a
human face' in Czechoslovakia in 1968, its uninterrupted activity is
astonishing. Its vitality in face of all the factual evidence seems to
lie in the analytical power of its criticism and even more in the
mobilizing power of its 'dream of the future'. The 'homelessness' of the
Left in both West and East is only the reverse side of its certainty for
the future. Much the same could probably be said of authentic Christian
faith. The best of its content seems to be refuted by the vagaries and
confusions of church history down to the present day. And yet it
displays its vitality in permanent reformations, and in spite of all
proof to the contrary, lives by the experience of in-extinguishable
hope. It is this inner homelessness which enables it to perpetuate its
institutions, even when they become an established part of
society."

Jurgen Moltmann

The Crucified God

"Communism is what Karl Marx hoped could be an economic scheme for making
industrialized nations take as good care of people, and especially of children
and the old and disabled, as tribes and extended families used to do, before
they were dispersed by the Industrial Revolution."

-Kurt Vonnegut At Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27,
2007

"But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the
most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. he said it was
the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for
people, and he wanted to get rid of it.

but when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word
"opium" wasn't simply metaphorical. Back then real opium was the only painkiller
available, for toothaches to cancer of the throat, or whatever. he himself had
used it.

As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was
glad they had something which ease their pain at least a little bit, which was
religion. he liked religion for doing that, and certainly didn't want to abolish
it, OK?"

-Kurt Vonnegut

At Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27,2007

"the communist is an ingenious self-deceiver who somehow avoids, for the time
being, committing suicide. Leave suicide, as a specialty, to the Gerondists,
anarchists, Objectivists, Libertarians, conservatives and liberal Democrats.
(I.e., to the most ineffectual types). Suicide is not for the communist. He
would rather have the whole world die than his ideology lose its place of power.
That is the definition which suicide assumes in the communist lexicon.

Marxist-Leninist doctrine derives its prestige from the
following: 1. It determines ultimate goals. 2. it frees from moral inhibitions.
3. It justifies acts of aggression and terror on the basis of promises
concerning the future; 4. it believes in the inevitability of its own victory. "

-J.R. Nyquist

The Origins of the Fourth World War

"Thus, the purely capitalist or the purely socialist country is
like a stroke patient who denies the existence of her right or left hand. The
fact that the ideological distinction is artificial was first spotted by Albert
Camus, who pointed out that both Western industrialism and its communist version
achieve similar results through similar means-industrialization and
specialization of labor. In the 1950s in Defence de L'Homme Revolte,
Camus accurately predicted that if the communist experiment were to fail, this
would be misunderstood, as an ideological victory by the West."

Camus also indicated a specific failure of both systems: their
inability to provide creative, meaningful work. We see this failure in the very
high rates of depression. we attempt to define depression as a psychological
ailment, but it is a symptom of a cultural failure: the inability to make life
meaningful or enjoyable. Depression in the face of depressing circumstances is a
symptom of unconscious rebellion. although the rebellious can are medicated into
submission, this does not address the underlying problem."

-Dmitry Orlov

Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects

"Most Americans have heard of communism, and automatically
believe that it is an apt description of the Soviet system, even though there
was nothing particularly communal about a welfare state and a vast industrial
empire run by an elitist central planning bureaucracy. But very few of them have
ever heard of the real operative "ism" that dominated Soviet life: "dofenism",
which can be loosely translated as "not giving a rat's ass." a lot of people,
more and more during the "stagnation" period of the 1980s,, felt nothing but
contempt for the system, did what little they had to do to get by (night
watchman and furnace stoker were favorite jobs among the highly educated) and
got all their pleasure from their friends, from their reading or from nature."

-Dmitry Orlov

ibid

"The crescendo of Christian (largely Protestant) association
with the Communist movement in the United States was signaled in a statement
by J.B. Matthews, an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his 1953 article,
"Reds and Our Churches." His provocative opening comment, "The largest
single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today
is composed of Protestant clergymen," drew praise for its candor from the
right wing of American Christianity and criticism from the left wing for its
defamatory and hate-inspiring consequences. Matthews' accusation illustrated
the deep political divide that separated American Christians, and his
comment reflected the nation's fear that communist philosophy had penetrated
to the heart of American culture and threatened to undermine its sacred
democracy."

-Charles McDaniel

God and Money: The moral challenge of capitalism

"The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude
of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a
faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is
disapproved of not only intellectually but also morally."

-Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

"Marxism isa religion. To the believer it presents, first, a
system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of lfie and are absolute
standards by which to judge events and actions; and , secondly, a guide to those
ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which
mankind, or a chosen section of mankind is to be saved."

-Joseph Schumpeter

"Communism is obsessed with a hatred of ways of life other than its own
and is afraid that unless these are swept away they will eventually overcome
it."

-Cyril Forster Garbett, D.D.

"How can one justify the fact that huge sums of money, which could
and should be used for increasing the development of peoples, are
instead utilized for the enrichment of individuals or groups, or
assigned to increase of stockpiles of weapons, both in developed
countries and developing one, thereby upsetting real priorities.?

-Pope John Paul VI

"Communism is the positive abolition of private
property, of human self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation
of human nature through and for man. It is therefore the return of
man himself as a social, i.e., really human,
being....""

Marx

"Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In communism,
inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence."

-Proudhon

"This government will not content itself with administering and
governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also
administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State
the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land....All that
will demand....the reign of scientific intelligence, the most
aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be
a new class, a new hierarchy....the world will be divided into a minority
ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then,
woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!"

Mikhail Bakunin (1872)

"Communism, though it be at present but little discussed, and now years away
its life in forgotten garrets on wretched straw pallets, is still the gloomy
hero to whom a great if transitory role is assigned in the modern tragedy and
which only awaits its cue to enter the stage."

-Heinrich Heine

"This Communism, so threatening to my peace of mind, so opposed to my
interests, casts a spell over me. I cannot struggle against its logic....let the
old social order be destroyed.....Let right be done, though the world perish.""

-Heinrich Heine

"Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in
himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor. He has very
little benevolence toward men and becomes....furious and spiteful....when
any dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is
to say Mr. Marx himself."

Michail Bakunin (1872)

"Marxism is a religion. To the believer, it presents, first, a
system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and absolute
standards to judge events and actions. It offered a "plan of
salvation" to its disciples, for which a "chosen section of
mankind" could be "saved"

Joseph Schumpeter

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

"The religion of Marxism is the falsification of knowledge....whence
comes this fierce hatred of intellectuals for the least barbaric societies
of hamn history, and this rage to destroy the only civilization to date that
have emphatically conferred a dominant rule on intelligence."

-Jean Francis Revel

The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information

"Marxism is the most religious of all religions and the Marxist the
most deeply religious of men."

A. V. Lunarcharsky

"The socialist future smells of knouts, of blood, of godlessness and
very many beatings...it is only with dread and horror that I think of the
time when those dark iconoclasts will come to power."

Heinrich Heine

"Mr. Marx is immensely malicious, vain, quarrelsome, as
intolerant and autocratic as Jehovah, the God of his fathers, and like
him, insanely vindictive. There is no lie, no calumny, which he is not
capable of using against anyone who has incurred his jealousy or his
hatred; he will not stop at the basest intrigue if, in his opinion, it
will serve to increase his position, his influence, and his power. Such
are his vices, but he also has many virtues. He is very intelligent, and
widely learned. In about 1840 he was the life and soul of a very
remarkable circle of radical Hegalians-Germans whose consistent cynicism
left far behind even the most rabid nihilists."

Bakunin

"I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and
intolerable. To no opinion which differed from his own did he accord the
honor of even condescending consideration; every argument that he did
not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable
ignorance that prompted it, or opprobrious aspersions upon the motives
of him who had advanced it. I remember most distinctly the word
bourgeois; and as a bourgeois-that is, as a detestable example of the
deepest mental and moral degeneracy-he denounced everyone who dared to
oppose his opinions."

Carl SchurzReminiscences

" I called myself a Marxist from the time I became a Socialist.
But, reading more history at Oxford, I began to feel that Marxism did
not work. Consider the famous sentence in the Communist Manifesto:
"The history of all hitherto recorded society is the history of
class struggles." Very impressive but not true. Perhaps all history
ought to have been the history of class struggles, but things did not
work out that way. There have been long periods of class collaboration
and many struggles that were not about class at all. I suppose my mind
is too anarchic to be fitted into any system of thought. Like Johnson' s
friend Edwards , I too, tried to be a Marxist but common sense kept
breaking in."

A.J.P. TaylorAccident Prone, or what happened Next-Journal of Modern History 49(March
1977)p,4

"In the chapter titled, "The Myth of the Proletariat," Aron shows that
the Marxist definition of this "class" does not correspond to any really
existing social entity; there are industrial workers, of course, but their
way of seeing this is simply not what Marxists say it is, quite apart from
what should be the obvious act that three industrial workers might very well
have three entirely different world-views, since they are individual human
persons capable of thinking for themselves. Once the Marxist taxonomy of
society is thus exposed as erroneous, the entire structure begins to
collapse

With so much supposedly at stake, now wonder Marxist-inspired
historians (literary critics, art historians, ad infinitum) are
prepared to revise history as it is presented in their disciplines so as to
provide sanction for the revolutionized utopia they envision for the
future."

Jonathan Chaves

The American Conservative Dec 15, 2003

"The socialist crusader interprets the conduct of others according to his
own idea of History....Because he proclaims the universal truth of a single
view of History, he reserves the right to interpret the past as he pleases."

-Raymond Aron

.

"When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances."

Khrushchev

"If there was anything worse than having dinner with Stalin, it was having to go on a vacation with him."

Khrushchev

"I want to emphasize the irony which lies in the fact that the description given of the aim of Marx and of the content of his
vision of socialism, fits almost exactly the reality of present day Western capitalist society. The majority of people are
motivated by a wish for greater material gain, for comfort and gadgets, and this wish is restricted only by the desire for
security and the avoidance of risks. They are increasingly satisfied with a life regulated and manipulated, both in the
sphere of production and of consumption , by the state and the big corporations and their respective bureaucracies; they have
reached a degree of conformity which has wiped out individuality to a remarkable extent. They are to use Marx ' s term, impotent
"commodity men " serving virile machines . The very picture
of mid-twentieth century capitalism is hardly distinguishable from the caricature of Marxist socialism as drawn by its opponents. "

Erich FrommMarx' s Concept of Man

"China's Communist leaders have concocted an "authoritarian
capitalism" that could be as exploitative as anything Marx-or Mao-ever
envisioned. Free markets and private enterprise, generated wealth and
prosperity, but unrestrained by democratic institutions, they also produced grim
work conditions: without trade unions, a free press, independent courts or
elections, workers have little leverage with their employers and no way to
remove corrupt officials, who often collude with business interests....No one
benefited more from the shift to capitalism than party officials and those with
connections to them....The party's betrayal of its founding ideology, the
logic-defying contortions that the propagandists used to explain the reversal,
the blunt calculus that holding on to power was an end that justified any
means-it all bred a cynicism in the party ranks, and access to the riches of the
booming economy quickly warped the party-state..."

-Philip P. Pan

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China

"Another reason lies in the fact ,that the Russian Communists
appropriated Marx’s theory and tried to convince the world that their
practice and theory follow his ideas. Although the opposite is true, the
West accepted their propagandistic claims and has come to assume that
Marx' s position corresponds to the Russian's view and practice.
However, the Russian Communists are not the only ones guilty of
misinterpreting Marx. While the Russian's brutal contempt for individual
dignity and humanistic values is, indeed, specific for them, the
misinterpretation of Marx as the proponent of an economist-hedonistic
materialism has also been shared by many of the anti-communist and
reformed socialists. The reasons are not difficult to see. While Marx's
theory was a critique of capitalism, many of his adherents were so
deeply imbued with the spirit of capitalism that they interpreted Marx's
thought in the economist and materialistic categories that are prevalent
in contemporary capitalism. "

Erich Fromm

"The Communists, with their methods, instead of putting the
people on the path to Communism, will finish by making them hate its
very name. Perhaps they are sincere, but their system hinders them from
introducing in practice the least principle of Communism. And, seeing
that the revolutionary work does not advance, they augur from this 'that
the people are not ready to swallow their decrees, that there must be
time, and diversions.' It is logical: the history of political
revolutions repeats itself. The saddest thing is that they recognize
nothing, do not wish to acknowledge their errors, and every ay take away
from the masses a fragment of the conquests of the revolution, to the
profit of the Centralizing State."

Prince Peter Kropotkin1920

"Proletarianism , in its various forms ranging from strict Marxism
to vague "democracy"....(is) self-satisfied to a degree perhaps
beyond the self-satisfaction of any recorded aristocracy. They are convinced
that whatever may be wrong with the world it cannot be themselves. Someone
else must be to blame for every evil. Hence, when the existence of God is
discussed, they by no mans think of Him as their Judge. On the contrary,
they are His judges. If He puts up a reasonable defense they will consider
it and perhaps acquit Him. They have no feelings of fear, guilt, or awe.
They think, from the very outset, of God's duties to them, not their duties
to Him. And God's duties to them are conceived not in terms of salvation but
in purely secular terms-social security, prevention of war, a higher
standard of life. "Religion" is judged exclusively by its
contribution to these ends."

C.S. Lewis

Present Concerns: Essays by C .S. Lewis

"Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the
historians of opinion-how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have
exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men,
and, through them, the events of history."

John Maynard KeynesThe End of Laissez-Faire 1925

"Socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a
dozen intellectuals."

Rosa Luxembourg (Prediction about "Bolshevism")

"The basic difference between capitalism and communism

is that under capitalism man exploits man,

and under communism it's the other way around."

-John Kenneth Galbraith

"Character of the businessman: gain, gain, always gain. To that
end, lies, lies and more lies. Exploitation, fraud, spoliation,
selfishness, contempt for the general interest, and supreme ingratitude."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"I could not and cannot fetch the doctor, because I have no
money for the medicine. For the last eight or ten days I have fed my
family on bread and potatoes, and today it is still doubtful whether I shall be able to obtain even these. "

Karl Marx (a letter to Engel’s)

"I have friends among the Communists . Some of them are like
sons to me. But it seems they do not make any distinction between fair
and foul , truth and falsehood. . .They seem to take their instructions
from Russia, which they regard as their spiritual home rather than
India. I cannot countenance this dependence on an outside power. "

Gandhi

"There is no greater misunderstanding or misrepresentation of
Marx than that which is to be found , implicitly or explicitly, in the
thought of the Soviet communists , the reformist socialists, and the
capitalist opponents of socialism alike, all of whom assume that Marx
wanted only the economic improvement of the working class , and that he
wanted to abolish private property so that the worker would win what the
capitalist now has.The truth is that for Marx the situation of a worker in a Russian
"socialist" factory, a British state-owned factory, or an
American factory such as General Motors, would appear essentially the
same. "

Erich Fromm

"Marx did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to
become the fate of the vast majority of people, especially of he
ever increasing segment of the population which manipulate symbols and
men, rather than machines. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the
executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker.
"

Erich Fromm

There are perhaps few marriages known to the world which were a human
fulfillment in such an extraordinary way as was that of Karl and Jenny
Marx. He , the son of a Jewish lawyer , fell in love as an adolescent
with Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian feudal family, and
a descendant of one of the oldest Scottish families. They married when
he was twenty-four years of age, and he survived her death by only a
little over a year. This was a marriage in which, despite the
differences in background, despite a continual life of material poverty
and sickness, there was unwavering love and mutual happiness, possible
only in the case of two people with an extraordinary capacity for love,
and deeply in love with each other. "

Erich Fromm

(Fromm forgets the unfortunate incident of Marx impregnating the
maid)

aa

"According to the materialist conception of history the
determining element in history is ultimately the production and
reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever
asserted. If, therefore, somebody twists this into the statement that
the economic element is the only determining one. he transforms it into
a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase , "

Engels

"Communism....is the name we apply to a system
under which people become accustomed to the performance of public duties
without any specific machinery of compulsion, when unpaid work for the
common good becomes the general phenomenon."

V.I. Lenin

Selected Works, Vol ,8,p.239

"Communism is the religion of poverty."

-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

LENINISM was built to analyze a world in which all the structures
were made of steel-now the sinews of society are founded on transistors
so small a Dragon Lady could hide them beneath her nail."

Norman Mailer

"Marxism possesses, of course, a logic of its own and through a
materialist interpretation of human existence, leads the victim to his
own negation, to the negation of his very personality, under the
fallacious pretext that whenever he says "I" or
"mine" he is guilty of the most sordid selfishness."

Arnold C . BrackmanThe Last EmperorScribners

"If humanity is shaped by its surroundings, its surroundings
must be made human. "

Karl Marx

"Marx only became so influential because Lenin studied
him."

Aldous Huxley

"The socialist crusader interprets the conduct of others
according to his own idea of History.....Because he proclaims the
universal truth of a single view of History, he reserves the right to
interpret the past as he pleases."

-Raymond Aron

"Among all the misunderstandings there is probably none more
widespread than the idea of Marx's materialism. "Marx is supposed
to have believed that the paramount psychological motive in man is his
wish for monetary gain and comfort, and that this striving for maximum
profit constitutes the main incentive in his personal life and in the
life of the human race. Complementary to this idea is the equally
widespread assumption that Marx neglected the importance of the
individual; that he had neither respect nor understanding for the
spiritual needs of man, and that his "ideal" was the well-fed
and well-clad, but "soulless" person. Marx's criticism of
religion was held to be identical with the denial of all spiritual
values, and this seemed all the more apparent to those who assume that
belief in God is the condition for a spiritual orientation. This view of
Marx then goes on to discuss his socialist paradise as one of millions
of people who submit to an all-powerful state bureaucracy, people who
have surrendered their freedom, even though they might have achieved
equality; these materially satisfied "individuals" have lost
their individuality and have been successfully transformed into millions
of uniform robots and automatons, led by a small elite of better-fed
leaders. Suffice it to say at the outset that this popular picture of
Marx' s "materialism"-his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish
for uniformity and subordination-is utterly false. Marx's aim was that
of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains
of economic determination, of restituting him in his his human
wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man
and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic
language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic
Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the
very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the
Reformation far into the nineteenth century. "

Erich FrommMarx' s Concept of Man

"Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind."

Joseph Alis SchumpeterCapitalism, Socialism and Democracy
1942

"He who places his trust in the Marxian synthesis as a whole, in
order to understand present situations and problems, is apt to be
woefully wrong."

Joseph Schumpeter

"There is little reason to believe that this socialism will mean
the advent of the civilization of which orthodox socialists dream. It is
much more likely to present fascist features. That would be a strange
answer to Marx's prayer. But history sometimes indulges in jokes of
questionable taste."

Joseph Schumpeter

"The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been
replaced by a new one , who does not obey does not eat . "

Trotsky

"I sometimes think that what people in the west dislike about
Soviet Russia is not the bad things in Soviet Russia but the good ones.
It is not so much that people dislike the labour camps, the suppression
of freedom of thought, the constant thought control, the secret police.
What many people really dislike is that Russia has no capitalists and no
private land- lords. Marxism-which is after all a perfectly legitimate
and coherent system of economic thought-is now used as a term of abuse
and it is supposed that anyone who is a Marxist can hardly be British at
all, even though Marxism was after all invented in the British Museum.
No system of thought is more fully integrally British than Marxism but
this not how people think of it nowadays. "

A.J.P. TaylorHow Wars Begin

"After 50 years of unrestricted domination over the minds of a
whole nation our leadership apparently fears even the slightest hint of
any discussion. A party with such methods of persuasion and education
can hardly claim to be the spiritual leader of mankind . "

Sakharov

"That minority (the rulers), the Marxists say, will consist of
workers. Yes, perhaps of former workers. And these, as soon as
they become rulers or representatives of the people, will cease to be
workers, and will begin to look down upon the entire world of manual
workers from the heights of the State. They will no longer represent the
people, but themselves and their own pretensions to rule the people.
Whoever has any doubts about that does not know human nature. But these
selected men will be ardently convinced, and at the same time learned,
socialists. The term 'scientific socialism', which continually occurs in
the works of Lassalle and of the Marxists, proves that the alleged
People's State will be nothing else but the quite despotic rule over the
popular masses by a new and not very numerous aristocracy of real or
spurious savants. The mass is uneducated, which means tht it will be
completely free from the worries of government; that it will be included
in the ruled herd....

They (the Marxists) will concentrate the reins of
government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people are in need of
quite a firm guardianship. They will establish a single State Bank that
will concentrate in its hands all commercial-industrial, agricultural
and even scientific production; and the mass of the people will be
divided into two armies, the industrial and the agricultural, which will
be under the direct command of government engineers who will constitute
a new privileged class."

Michael Bakunin (1873)

"In short, I believe that Marxism is based on the big lie. Even
if it were perfectly practiced as desired by its youthful followers,
that lie would still prevent the total realization of Self and still
foster the selfish idealism of those arrogant, insensitive people who
think they can say for another what he should do with the precious gift
of life."

Christopher HillNuclear Evolution

"It destroys everything and everyone....a darkness; a paralysis; in
the country, a blight, sterility; shouting monotonously its empty
formula-classless, socialist society-it attacks with methodical barbarity,
not only men and classes and institutions, but the soul of a society. It
tears up society by the root and leaves it dead. "If we go" Lenin
said, " we shall slam the door on an empty house."

Muggeridge

"Pol Pot's regime repudiated the very idea of economic
progress, seeking to transport Cambodia back into a pre-industrial,
pre-commercial, pre-capitalist utopia. 'Year Zero' was proclaimed. The towns
were to be emptied. All markets were to be abolished. There would be no
money. Everyone would now work in agricultural cooperatives, where there
would be no private property. They would dress only in black. They would eat
communally. The aim was to produce 'Kampuchea'" a pure communist agrarian
state. Every form of Western contamination was to be eradicated, even modern
medicine. And as far as the Khmer Rouge were concerned, it did not much
mater how many people died in the process. As they told the bewildered
city-dwellers, the so-called 'New People' who had not been on the right side
during the civil war; 'To preserve you is no gain, to destroy you is no
loss.' Destruction was indeed Pol Pot's only forte, since his sole venture
into construction-a complex of new canals and dams intended to rival the
temples of Angkor Wat-ended in abject failure. The main supporters of the
previous regime were executed in short order, along with their families.
Anyone who question Angkar-'the Organization'-was treated in the same
way. Even to be ill was to betray a 'lack of revolutionary consciousness'.
As in China's Cultural Revolution, teachers were viewed with suspicion, but
so too were students and university graduates. The Khmer Rouge were short of
bullets, so they used axes, knives and bamboo sticks. Children selected for
execution had their heads smashed against banyan trees. Executions were
often carried out with a pickaxe in the rice paddies-the so-called killing
fields. The Toul Sleng prison became an 'extermination centre', where some
14,000 people were tortured to death, many of the Khmer Rouge cadres who had
fallen under suspicion. Some victims were publicly disemboweled, their
livers cooked and eaten by their executioners. It was not unusual for a
revolution to devour its own children; only in Cambodia were they sometimes
literally devoured. In all, between 1.5 and 2 million people died as a
result of execution, maltreatment or starvation, out of a total population
of only seven million."

-Niall Ferguson

The War of the World

"The Monuments have fallen now and the faces are changed. In the
graveyards the martyrs have been rehabilitated and everywhere the names
have been restored. The Soviet Union, once hailed by progressives
everywhere as "one-sixth of mankind on the road to the
future." no longer exists. Leningrad is St. Petersburg again. The
radical project to change the world has left behind a world in ruin. In
a revolutionary eye blink, a bloody lifetime has passed into history.
Once vacancies memorialize a catastrophe whose human sum can never be
calculated. "

David Horowitz

The Politics of Bad Faith

"The contrast between Marx and Freud with regard to history is
quite clear. Marx had an unbroken faith in man's perfectibility and progress,
rooted in the Messianic tradition of the West from the prophets through
Christianity, the Renaissance, and Enlightenment thinking. Freud, especially the
Freud after the First World War, was a skeptic. he saw the problem of human
evolution as an essentially tragic one. Whatever man did, it ended in
frustration; if he should return to become a primitive again, he would have
pleasure, but no wisdom; if he goes on as a builder of ever more complicated
civilizations, he becomes wiser, but also unhappier and sicker. For Freud,
evolution is an ambiguous blessing, and society does as much harm as it does
good. For Marx, history is a march toward man's self-realization; society,
whatever the evils produced by any given society may be, is the condition for
man's self-creation and unfolding. The "good society" for Marx becomes identical
with the society of good men, that is, of fully developed, sane, and productive
individuals."

-Erich Fromm: Beyond the chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and
Freud

"I is indeed one of the most drastic examples of man's capacity
for distortion and rationalization that Marx is attacked by the spokesmen for
capitalism because of his allegedly "materialistic" aims. Not only is this not
true, but what is paradoxical is that the same spokesmen for capitalism combat
socialism by saying that the profit motive-on which capitalism is based, is the
only potent motive for human creative activity, and that socialism could not
work effectively because it excludes the profit motive as the main stimulus in
the economy. All this is even more complex and paradoxical if one considers that
Russian communism has adopted this capitalist thinking, and that for Soviet
managers, workers, and peasants, the profit motive is by far the most important
incentive in the present Soviet economy. Not only in practice but often also in
theoretical statements about human motivation, the Soviet System and the
capitalist system agree with each other, and both are equally in contradiction
to Marx's theories and aims."

-Erich Fromm

ibid

"Simply put, Marxism is based on a false idea of human
selflessness and can therefore never work because the power seekers will
benefit even more ruthlessly than the money seekers benefit in the
Western Democratic system."

Christopher Hill

"We are still left with that (now) unforgivable fact that some of
the most socially concerned, hopeful-for-the-future, dedicated souls
connived at the crimes in the Communist world, by refusing to recognize them
and, then, by refusing to acknowledge them openly. Not ten, or a hundred, or
a thousand, but many thousands, millions all over the world. And this attitude-reluctance
to criticize the Soviet Union, the great alma mater-goes on now and is shown
by the way Hitler is put in the position of chief criminal of our times,
whereas Stalin, a thousand times worse-and Hitler admired Stalin, quite
properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great
exemplar-is still handled gently in the imaginations of people on the
Left."

Doris Lessing

Walking in the Shade

"Have you noticed how after forty years of Communism,
the bourgeoisie landed on its feet again in just a few days? They survived
in a thousand ways-some of them jailed, some thrown out of their jobs,
others who even did very nicely, had brilliant careers, ambassadors,
professors. Now their sons and grandsons are back together again, a kind of
secret fraternity, they've taken over the banks, the newspapers, the
parliament, the government."

Milan Kundera

Ignorance

"Get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!"

-Karl Marx's last words

"the true Sovietists or Communists....are the industrialists themselves. They
would have the government set up an economic super-organization , which in turn
would become the government."

I'll Take My Stand see Wendell Berry in The Fatal Harvest
Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture

"The Marxist had wasted the forces of revolution for fifty years, he
had no vision; he had only a condemnation for established things."

-H.G. Wells

"....After the fall of Somoza, a kind of euphoria about Marxism gripped
the minds of many-bishops, Jesuits, Maryknoll missionary priests and
diocesan priests, and layfolk. Nor were Catholics alone in this. Five
Protestant pastors issued a statement in 1979 claiming that "Christians can
honestly use Marxist analyses without ceasing to be Christians, " and that
"Marxists can experience faith in Christ without ceasing to be
revolutionary."

Indeed, euphoria seemed to run as out of spigots, to flood
the world. Poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal wrote in the April 1980 issue of One World, the organ of the World Council of Churches, "This is a
revolution that carries a deep sign of Christian love. It is enough that you
look at the faces of the young Sandinistas who carry weapons in our streets.
In them there is no hatred, their look is clean, their eyes shine, and their
hearts sing."

The Reverend Ian Murray, Chairman of the Scottish Catholic
International Aid Fund (SCIAF), dutifully visited Nicaragua and looked at
all those young faces. He gave the Sandinistas his "unqualified support"
because "in Nicaragua it is almost as though an attempt has been made to
implement the Beatitudes."

Father Carney, a Jesuit working among Guatemala's poorest,
wrote ecstatically about "this wonderful, popular, Sandinista revolutionary
process" and about "the intimate relationship between Sandinism, as it is
lived today in Nicaragua, and Christianity", and he spoke about his work
"with the lay leaders and many good Christian revolutionary Delegates of the
Word, most of whom belong to the Sandinista Militia."

-Malachi Martin

The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman
Catholic Church

"Marx's philosophy entailed some practical consequences which would
bring indescribable suffering and misery to mankind: private property and
the market were to be abolished and replaced by universal and all-embracing
planning-an utterly impossible project. It was noticed towards the end of
the 19th century, mainly by anarchists, that so conceived, the Marxist
doctrine was good blueprint for converting human society into a giant
concentration camp: to be sure, this was not Marx's intention, but it was an
inevitable effect of the glorious and final benevolent utopia he
devised."

-Leszek Kolakowski

Main Currents of Marxism

"Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In
communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a level with
excellence."

-Proudhon

"In a short space of time Watt taught me a great deal about
Marxism, totalitarianism and the state. The danger of Marxism, he used to say,
is that it is temptingly simple. he considered it a half-truth. While all the
other great religions (he called Marxism a secular religion) dealt only with
life. In place of the Marxist doctrine of class war, Watt advocated cooperation
based on Christian charity and recognition of the dignity of labour. Not that he
refused to give Marx his due. he considered Marx's protest against the social
conditions of the time and his grandeur of conception admirable."

-William Woodruff

Beyond nab End

"With disdain I will throw my gauntlet

Full in the face of the world,

And see the collapse of this pygmy giant

Whose fall will not stifle my ardour.

Then will I wander godlike and victorious

Through the ruins of the world

And, giving my words an active force,

I will feel equal to the Creator."

-Karl Marx

Workers of the world....forgive me.

-Karl Marx

-Graffiti on a statue, Moscow 1991

".....Those who assume that Marxism is a relic (that only professors toy
with) should be reminded that the average college graduate unconsciously takes
more of Marx with him into the world than anything else. We cannot begin to
estimate the hold which Marxist thought has on the country's elite. It pervades
our institutions. In fact, scientific socialism has wormed its way however
camouflaged, into our business schools. We should not be surprised that this
oh-so-gentle cosmological insinuation fails to sport a Stalin mustache or speak
with a thick Russian accent. After all, we are not the czar's peasants. The West
is more sophisticated; therefore, a more sophisticated type of propaganda tends
to prevail here, and a different feeling about socialism than what prevails in
backward countries. As for those who imagine that Marxism is dead, a side note:
Try getting an advanced degree in political science today while denouncing
Marxist ideas. See how far you get before you find half a dozen unexpected
obstacles placed in your path. The war of ideas has its ideological warriors.
They cannot stop a person from getting a degree, but they can make it costly.
Certainly, if an aspiring academic has the least sense of career advantage, his
ideological predisposition must be adjusted accordingly."

-J.R. Nyquist

Origins of the Fourth World War

"Way back in 1867, in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx
(yes, that Karl Marx) wrote all about how capitalism instilled alienation among
workers. It was a different time, but in many ways his four dimensions of
alienation still apply. according to Marx, Mr. 19th Century was alienated first
from the very product he produced: by virtue of the factory's division of labor,
he could only know a fraction of what it actually took to make the whole (who,
for example, knows how to make an entire motorcycle from scratch except the Fonz
on Happy Days?). Mr. 1867 was alienated next from the process of labor:
Unavoidable, since, unlike Marx's idealized medieval craftsman, the factory
worker could not set his own schedule and work rhythm but had to answer to the
time clock and the wagemaster. Alienated from the labor process and product, it
thus was inevitable that he was also alienated from himself: The act of creation
that had made him uniquely human was no longer possible (never mind that recent
studies have shown that chimps are tool creators as well). Finally, he was
alienated from other people, since capitalism makes all relations market
relations."

Dalton Conley

Elsewhere U.S.A.

"It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has
none to advance against its opponents....it lacks arguments and hence there is
the club, the concentration camp, the insane asylum.....Communism has never
concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality, it scoffs
at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputatable
categories....Communism is anti-humanity."

-Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

"Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a rule, prefer themselves to
others, and those nearest to them to those more remote, from that moment
Communism is not only practicable, but the only defensible form of society; and
will, when that time arrives, be assuredly carried into effect."

-John Stuart Mill

"In the last analysis, all the truths of Marxism can be summed up in the
sentence: To rebel is justified!